Bits 'n Pieces: From 'SAW' to 'Insidious', From 'Buried' to 'ATM' & More
The team behind Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, Jason Blum and Steven Schneider )signed a 5 picture deal with Canadian distributor Alliance Films to finance and produce low-budget genre pics.
According to Variety the first title is Insidious from Saw creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Storyline for Insidious is being kept under wraps, other than Wan saying "Leigh wrote a fantastic script that took a haunted house movie with all the usual conventions and twisted it on its head." Filming begins this spring in L.A.
Variety reports that Gold Circle Films are producing ATM, written by Buried's Chris Sparling with David Brooks set to direct as his feature debut. ATM centers on 'three co-workers who -- on a routine stop at an ATM -- unexpectedly end up in a desperate fight for their lives'. ATM is set to begin filming in the fall.
Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds, was the first major sale at Sundance with Lionsgate snapping up domestic distribution rights for $3.2 million.
Latino Review is reporting that Dimension films have lost the rights to Joe Hill's comic Locke and Key. The film adaptation is now set to be written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci for Dreamworks. In the comic, kids discover doors of a mansion opened by special keys harbor some dark secrets.
According to Variety Gary Kurtz, whose credits as a producer include Star Wars and American Graffiti is behind a new supernatural thriller called Panzer 88. The 20 million dollar film, which is set to begin filming in Eastern Europe later this year centers on 'the German army crew of the world's biggest tank, the King Tiger, who are sent to a snowy wasteland on the Russian border during WW2. There they stir up a supernatural creature that wreaks revenge for the destruction of a partisan village'.
Briggs is also attached to direct his original screenplay Mortis Rex, a Roman era supernatural thriller that was announced at the AFM.
According to Variety, Stephen T. Kay (The Shield, Friday Night Lights) is directing a new thriller called Isolation. Filming began Jan. 25 and it stars Eva Amurri (Californication) and David Harbour (Revolutionary Road).
'Amurri plays a medical student who awakens in a hospital isolation room having been exposed to an unknown disease, desperately ill and with no recollection of how she got there'.
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